Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Apodex-1.1-mini vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

Apodex-1.1-mini scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's 59 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Apodex-1.1-mini C

Best for Long-running agent tasks with tools on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, or through Apodex's API, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 50
  • Risk, 65 against 50
  • Agent interface, 85 against 75

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, and agent guidance only from the harness

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server who want DeepSeek's agent model under MIT, with the hosted API as a fallback.

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 48 against 38

Watch for

510.3 GB of files and no smaller build anywhere, so it won't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApodex-1.1-miniDeepSeek V4.1 FlashEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258550Apodex-1.1-mini +35
Risk20%206550Apodex-1.1-mini +15
Agent interface10%108575Apodex-1.1-mini +10
Documentation and upkeep10%103848DeepSeek V4.1 Flash +10
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 59/100

Facts side by side

FactApodex-1.1-miniDeepSeek V4.1 Flash
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorApodex AIDeepSeek
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-252026-10-17
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Apodex-1.1-mini

An agent cousin fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for long tasks with files, code and tools, with parallel tool calling and about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for Apodex's GGUF, NVFP4 or GPTQ-Int4 builds or about 86 GB in BF16, and Apodex's API serves it too. The main risks are no safety results and no replies from the publisher.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

A large multimodal agent model with a 1M-token context, documented tool calls, JSON Schema output and a reasoning budget, under MIT. It needs about 612 GB of memory across several GPUs in vLLM or SGLang. The main risks are prompts built from DeepSeek's code rather than a template, no published safety results and no answers in its repositories.

Before you call either

Apodex-1.1-mini

  1. Serve it with vllm serve apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, or the same parsers in SGLang, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  2. For llama.cpp, llama-server -hf apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja --reasoning-format deepseek, and the card passes the repository's chat_template.jinja with --chat-template-file
  3. Pass tools through the API's tools parameter rather than in the system prompt, as the card asks
  4. The card recommends temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, repetition_penalty 1.05 and max_tokens up to 32,768
  5. Send your own system prompt, or set identity_mode, since the template otherwise adds an Apodex identity block
  6. The template keeps all earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  8. The card's Python example has a broken line where it runs the tool (available_toolsname), so fix it to available_tools[name](**args) before running
  9. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

  1. DeepSeek's reference run is its inference folder, convert.py with --model-parallel 8 --expert-dtype fp4, then torchrun --nproc-per-node 8 generate.py --ckpt-path "$SAVE_PATH" --config config.json --interactive
  2. In vLLM 0.32.0 the parsers are named deepseek_v41 for both --tool-call-parser and --reasoning-parser. That's vLLM's naming, DeepSeek doesn't document a vLLM command
  3. Build prompts with encoding.py or pip install deepseek-recipe, not the September repository's chat_template.jinja, which an open pull request says trails the 16 October encoding
  4. Tool calls come back in a DSML calls block with a space before calls, invoke and parameter, unlike V4
  5. Set reasoning_effort to 1 to 100, or low, high or max (50, 75, 100), in thinking mode only. Default is 75
  6. Sample at temperature 1.0 and top_p 1.0 and allow 256K or more output tokens, as the card recommends
  7. Without the hardware, call DeepSeek's API as deepseek-flash, which serves this exact update

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Apodex-1.1-mini or DeepSeek V4.1 Flash?

Apodex-1.1-mini scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's 59 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Apodex-1.1-mini or DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

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